Dr. Terrence Sejnowski

Thiago Cesar Lousada Marsola

腳本

In this video, we're going to delve deeper into memory. Another key to memorization is to create meaningful groups that simplify the material. Let's say you wanted to remember four plants that help ward off vampires. Garlic, rose, hawthorn and mustard. The first letters abbreviate to GRHM, so all you need to do to remember is use the image of a graham cracker. It's much easier to remember numbers by associating them with memorable events. The year 1965 might be when one of your relatives was born for example. Or you can associate numbers with a numerical system you're familiar with. For example, 11.0 seconds is a good running time for the 100 meter dash. Or 75 might be the number of stitches on a knitting needle for the ski hats you like to make. Personally, I like to associate numbers with the feelings of, when was I was or will be at a given age. The number 18 is an easy one. That's the age when I went out into the world. By age 104 I hope to be an old, but happy great grandma. Many disciplines use memorable sentences to help students memorize concepts. The first letter of each word in the sentence is also the first letter of each word in a list that needs to be memorized. Medicine, for example, is laden with memorable mnemonics. Among the cleaner of which are: some lovers try positions that they can't handle to memorize the names of the carpal bones of the hand, and old people from Texas eat spiders for the cranial bones. Time after time, these kinds of memory tricks prove helpful. If you're memorizing something commonly used, see whether someone has come up with a particularly memorable memory trick by searching it out online. Otherwise try coming up with your own. The memory palace technique is a particularly powerful way of grouping things you want to remember. It involves calling to mind a familiar place. Like the layout of your house, and using it as a sort of a visual notepad where you can deposit the concept images that you want to remember. All you have to do is call to mind the place you're familiar with. Your home, your route to school, or your favorite restaurant and voila in the blink of an imaginative eye. This becomes the memory palace that you'll use as your notepad. The memory palace technique is useful for remembering unrelated items, such as a grocery list. Milk, bread, eggs. To use the technique, you might imagine a gigantic bottle of milk just inside your front door. The bread plopped on the couch and a cracked egg dribbling off the edge of the coffee table. In other words, you'd imagine yourself walking through a place you know well, coupled with shockingly memorable images of what you want to remember. If you're studying Finance, Sociology, Chemistry or what have you, and you have lists to remember, you could use this same approach. The first time you do this, it will be slow. It takes a bit of time to conjure up a solid mental image. But the more you do it, the quicker it becomes. One study showed that a person using the Memory Palace technique could remember more than 95% of a 40 to 50 item list after only one or two practice mental walks, where the items were placed on the grounds of the local university. In using the mind this way, memorization can become an outstanding exercise in creativity that simultaneously build neural hooks for even more creativity. Purists might sniff that using oddball memorization gimmicks isn't really learning. But researchers show that students who use this kind of tricks outperform does who don't. In addition, imaging research on how people become experts, shows that such memory tools speed up the acquisition of both chunks and big picture templates. Helping transform novices to semi experts much more quickly, even in a matter of weeks. Memory tricks allow people to expand their working memory with easy access to long term memory. What's more, the memory process itself becomes an exercise in creativity. The more you memorize using these innovative techniques, the more creative you become. This is because you're building these wild, unexpected possibilities for future connections early on. Even as you're first internalizing the ideas, the more you practice this type of memory muscle so to speak, the more easily you'll be able to remember. Where at first it may take 15 minutes to build an evocative image for an equation and embed it say, in the kitchen sink of your memory palace, it can later take only minutes or seconds to perform a similar task. You'll also realize that as you begin to internalize key aspects of the material. Taking a little time to commit the most important points to memory. You come to understand it much more deeply. The formulas will mean far more to you, than they would if you simply looked them up in a book. And you'll be able to sling those formulas around much more proficiently on tests and in real world applications. You may say, well, you're just not that creative, an equation or theory could hardly have its own grandiose motivations or persnickeity emotional needs to help you understand and remember it. But always remember, your childlike creativity is still there inside you. You just need to reach out to it. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning how to learn. [BLANK_AUDIO]